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I have the diamond viperII savage 2000 card and it looks great, I don't know about benchmarks but it runs all my 3d games in d3d and openGL at a fair old pace. The PC it is in has a 700mhz athlon, I don't know if it runs less well in a lower spec system. The price was just over £100 from www.insight.com/uk for the full retail pack ( includes one game ).

I understand that the T&L driver will not be developed further by S3 and that the release does not run particularly well. The standard drivers are rock solid. However there have been posts from some saying they have had problems on some setups but I guess that is the same for all video cards.

I wouldn't think you will see a huge performance boost from the V3500 - and you'll lose your TV tuner! but you will notice much better quality graphics, I have a V3000 in another machine and it does not look anything like as good.

You could sell your V3500 on somewhere like www.QXL.com and be closer to purchasing a geforce 2 as another option I suppose.

Well, basically the fill rate is great, and the penalty for going 32 bit is relatively low for a SDR card. It overclocks nicely to 150 MHz, if you're not affraid of attaching a fan to its heatsink, giving you a good 600 MTexel/s in 16 bit modes. That seriously outguns a GeForce (though is still not a match for a GTS). It also works really nice in Unreal Tournament, with the MeTaL driver... but unfortunately that's the only game supported by the MeTaL driver.

The T&L... well, the one on the Savage2000 is slow. On the other hand, even on a GTS, T&L only really helps in relatively low res modes. E.g., without any hardware T&L an Athlon 750 can do software T&L for 100+ fps in Quake 3, which is more than enough, and won't be a limit any time soon. Most of us will turn on more eye candy or bump more resolution, instead or going for more fps at that point.

What I'm trying to say here is: T&L is not a boost to the fill rate. If you're CPU limited, yes, hardware T&L can help. (Assuming your game is one of the very few supporting it.) But if you've pushed the resolution and eye candy high enough to be fill-rate limited, T&L may well make very little difference, or even none at all. Either the CPU or a fast hardware T&L will still get to finish before the renderer, and wait for it. The hardware T&L will finish faster, but it will get to wait just as much.

Marketing hype notwithstanding, for now fast CPU can substitute hardware T&L quite nicely. It doesn't really have to be faster than the hardware T&L, which is a pretty hard task. It just has to be faster than the renderer, which is in fact quite easy in higher resolutions.

Don't bother... i had one on my Atlon 700 with MSI K7Pro mobo (heard they work bit better on Asus mobos)... it was realy crap with older games like Unreal and Half Life... (generally incorrect textures.. and crap like that.. it's stable though) but it's totally awsome with Q3.
I'd say if u had an Intel based pc.. it would be a good choice to get one, but with Athlon... don't bother.
I got a CL TNT 2 now

You can't really just say the card sucks. You have to look at the price it is sold for. You can go as low as $100 for this card, maybe even lower if you go onto eBay. The price does reflect a lot on the product. I have a 64MB GTS and I have to say, it shoots out some pretty impressive benchmarks. But then again I think it impressed my wallet more than it did me. Good Luck on your decision.

Just for the sake of throwing another two pence into the flame, the Savage2000 used to have goddamn awful drivers, but it looks like 9.50.05 fixed most bugs, and 9.51.01 actually worked well for me. I've used it with an Athlon, both with an Irongate based mobo, and with a Via KX133 based one. Worked very well, and at AGP 4x too. Only gave up on it because I've bought the Voodoo5.